All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Stalwart, dependable geologist Mitch Wayne has been a faithful friend of multimillionaire oil tycoon Jasper Hadley and his family since childhood. The Hadley empire is so powerful and omnipresent that even the Texas town Jasper reigns over is named after him. Both of Hadley’s adult children are spoiled, self-indulgent types, wallowing in their own depravity. Kyle is an impotent alcoholic while Marylee is an insatiable nymphomaniac, whose list of things to do includes the one man she hasn’t already had . . . Mitch. “Marylee is like a sister to me” is Mitch’s default response whenever it’s suggested that he should make a decent woman out of her.

  When Mitch meets demure secretary Lucy Moore, he is instantly smitten, believing he has finally found a woman as grounded and morally centered as he is (“Maybe we’re two of a kind,” he tells her.). Lucy, however, only has eyes for Kyle, who introduces the working girl to a world of plush, wall-to-wall luxury. After jetting off to a ritzy hotel in Kyle’s private DC-3, Lucy immediately begins to have second thoughts. The designer gowns, expensive lingerie, and fancy perfumes seem like a down payment on her virtue. Once Lucy makes it clear that she’s interested in Kyle for himself—and not for his extravagant lifestyle, the couple elopes . . . much to Mitch’s dismay. However, the honeymoon is definitely over once Kyle and Lucy return to the Hadley homestead, where, in the best Sirkian tradition, pent-up longings and simmering tensions boil over into a highly stylized, psycho-sexual melodrama.

  With its schizzy quartet of characters, Written on the Wind reflected just how conflicted postwar American society had become. In 1956, the year that the film was released, a traditional Biblical epic like The Ten Commandments dominated the box office while the tawdry Peyton Place became a runaway bestseller. For a culture in the throes of an identity crisis, Written on the Wind seemed to blurt out everything that had been left unspoken throughout the decade.

  Given a choice of roles, what actor wouldn’t want to sink his teeth into playing a maniacal alcoholic or a conniving nympho? As Rock was Universal’s top-billed attraction, it was automatically assumed that the bravura role of Kyle Hadley had been reserved for him. As it turned out, nothing—not even the promise of an Oscar win—was allowed to tamper with Rock Hudson’s virtuous, white knight image. “Rock Hudson would very much like to play the rich drunk, but his fans won’t accept his doing anything shoddy,” Universal’s head of publicity, David A. Lipton, explained in a press release. “They like him because he’s what they want their daughters to marry, or their children’s father to be like. If we let him out of that sort of character, they’d howl.”

  If the ticket-buying public preferred Rock as noble, valiant, and eternally self-sacrificing, that’s exactly what they would get. Hudson would play Mitch Wayne, the noble, valiant, and eternally self-sacrificing hero. The straight man, figuratively speaking. “As usual, I’m so pure, I am impossible,” Rock told an interviewer.

  Although Lauren Bacall would later confess that she loathed the story (“Soap opera beyond soap opera, a masterpiece of suds!”), she signed on to play Lucy Moore at the urging of her husband, Humphrey Bogart: “My career had not been flourishing, yet again, and when I told Bogie about it, he thought I should do it if the set-up seemed right. It had a big budget, a good cast. I’d never done anything quite like it before—a really straight leading lady, no jokes, so I said yes.”

  A decade earlier, a young beauty named Dorothy Malone had given Bacall some competition in the come-hither department when both appeared in the noir classic The Big Sleep. As a bespectacled bookstore clerk who seduces Humphrey Bogart one thundery afternoon, Malone made an indelible impression. Subsequently, she built a substantial career out of playing what Rex Reed described as “the classiest whores in Hollywood.” Who better to play the town tramp cruising around in a ruby red sports car?

  The plum role of Kyle would go to Robert Stack, on loan-out from 20th Century-Fox. Hudson and Stack had shared the screen in Fighter Squadron eight years earlier, only now their positions were reversed. Hudson was the major box office star, Stack the supporting player.* Despite his secondary role, Stack’s scenery-chewing performance would dominate the picture. “He never said a word, not a peep,” Stack would say of Hudson. “Since I was a loan-out actor and Universal was his home base, he could have used his influence to have the heart cut out of my part . . . I can’t tell you how many others in this survival profession would have done this differently. He was in a position of power and didn’t misuse it.”

  With Written on the Wind, Sirk presents his own unique brand of Confidential-style exposé. After introducing us to his mansion dwellers, who are as cosmetically perfect as their surroundings, the director reveals that behind closed doors, they are actually totally depraved lost souls. But Sirk doesn’t stop there; he also seizes the opportunity to expose the dark underbelly of the American Dream. After all, he would later remark that Written on the Wind was “a film about failure.”

  “With Written on the Wind, Sirk is ready to get into the emotional underground of America in the 1950’s,” says film historian David Thomson. “He wants to explore some more radical ideas . . . Sirk was a very intelligent man but he went to great pains not to let his intelligence show too much. He knew Hollywood well enough to know that displaying his intellectualism could be very alarming. So what he does is bring Rock Hudson in as his star because he knows Hudson can carry a big film like Written on the Wind and also deliver a large audience. Meanwhile, Sirk can examine these themes of family, class, unfulfilled sexuality.”

  From a contemporary perspective, the film contains more than a few insider nods to its leading man’s real-life dilemma. In an early scene, Jasper Hadley says to Mitch, “It’s about time you got hitched, isn’t it?” To which Mitch responds, “No, I have trouble enough finding oil.” It’s almost an in-joke, a spoof of every Photoplay interview Rock Hudson ever gave. The cute, quick-witted dodge to that eternal marriage question.

  In a later scene, Biff Miley (Grant Williams), the latest in a long line of brawny Marylee conquests, is dragged out of her room at the El Paraiso Motel and made to answer before Papa Hadley. After Jasper reprimands him for taking advantage of his daughter, Biff lays it on the line: “She picked me up . . . Your daughter’s a tramp, mister.” Although Marylee’s promiscuity is hardly a closely guarded secret around town, Mitch cautions the young stud, “Let’s keep this quiet.” Here Hadley Oil could be the executive offices of Universal-International, doing their best to squelch rumors about their top star’s homoerotic antics while hushing up the editors of Confidential. Is it any wonder that Hudson was the one actor that Sirk worked with more than any other? With a secret, sexually transgressive lifestyle imprisoned within a “normal,” straight-acting, suitable-for-framing public persona, Rock Hudson is not only the star of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, he is one.

  In Written on the Wind, Sirk’s luxurious visual style and incisive commentary on American culture find their most exquisitely lurid outlet. In the film’s most indelible sequence, a defiant Marylee cuts loose as “Temptation” blares on the soundtrack, providing the overture to what has been called “one of the most brilliant sequences of 1950s melodrama.” Fired up by the frenzied music, Marylee flits about her bedroom while wearing a billowing chiffon negligee; she is a delirious, oversexed hummingbird. At one point, she dances with a framed photograph of Mitch, her unobtainable ideal.

  Having just been told that his daughter has been keeping the El Paraiso Motel in business, Jasper Hadley starts up the stairs,* prepared to confront his wayward daughter. Halfway up, the long-suffering patriarch’s heart gives out just as Marylee’s dance of deliverance reaches a fever pitch. Jasper collapses, tumbles down the stairs, and dies. Both literally and figuratively, parent and child have destroyed one another.

  Symbolic of the fact that he has sired a pair of narcissistic good-for-nothings, Jasper is mourned not by his biological offspring, who are otherwise engaged, but by his surrogate son and daughter—Mitch and Lucy. But Sirk doesn’t let J
asper Hadley off the hook, either. While daddy was off drilling for profits and immersed in business deals, his children were psychically abandoned. Ironically, Kyle and Marylee, who have been given anything they could possibly want, are at the same time emotionally malnourished, having been weaned only on Hadley Oil.

  Thanks largely to its laundry list of taboos, Written on the Wind grossed over $4 million when it was released in 1956 and the picture proved to be one of Rock’s most popular films of the 1950s. Both Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone were nominated for Oscars, with Malone taking home the statuette for her peroxide blonde Iago. Over the years, filmmakers as diverse as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Allison Anders, Todd Haynes, and Kathryn Bigelow have all paid tribute to the film’s operatic intensity and its mesmerizing, dreamlike imagery. Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar echoed the feelings of many when he said, “I have seen Written on the Wind a thousand times and I can’t wait to see it again.”

  “THAT’S WHAT I was interested in—a man who kills and saves children,” Douglas Sirk would say when asked why he wanted to make Battle Hymn. “This guy was an ambiguous character . . . in other words, highly interesting as a subject for drama.”

  Sirk’s seventeenth film for Universal, Battle Hymn, was based on the extraordinary exploits of Colonel Dean Hess, the so-called “flying parson.” A Cleveland-based minister, Hess had enlisted as an aviation cadet after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Church elders were stunned that such a devoutly religious man was determined to go into battle. Any attempts to talk him out of signing up proved futile. As Hess later said, “I felt that it would be morally wrong for me to say to others, ‘I believe in your cause but you do the killing for me.’”

  Dubbed a “one-man air force,” Hess was involved in some 250 combat missions over Europe. During a bombing raid over a German railroad yard, Hess inadvertently destroyed an orphanage, killing thirty-seven children. “A little hole appeared in the wall from the penetration of the bomb casing,” Hess wrote in his autobiography. “A moment later, the insides of the building spilled out . . . It seemed to stare at me like some malevolent eye. I wondered if beneath the piles of bricks a few small bodies still lay.”

  After the war, Hess returned to the ministry. Though in 1948, he was recalled and deployed to Korea to train fighter pilots. In his spare time, Hess and other airmen joined Korean social workers in rounding up orphans in Seoul. After evacuating and airlifting the children to an island off the South Korean coast, Hess and the others founded an orphanage, an act which many interpreted as atonement for the earlier tragedy.

  With wartime heroics, a protagonist grappling with a guilt complex and adorable orphans all factored in, Hess’s story practically demanded a Hollywood biopic. And it got it. When Universal suggested that Robert Mitchum should portray Hess on film, the flying preacher balked; he didn’t want to be played by a “former jailbird” who had been arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession. But Hess couldn’t have been more pleased with the studio’s next choice—Rock Hudson. “He’s the only man I know of who could do this part and keep it from being a war story,” Hess told The Hollywood Reporter. “Hudson has great character and is so skillful in his portrayal, that I frequently felt that I was watching my alter ego.”

  Even if Hess felt that Hudson was the perfect actor to portray him and that Douglas Sirk had an excellent track record as a director, the Colonel wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. Hired as a technical advisor on Battle Hymn, Hess became an inescapable presence on the set, even accompanying cast and crew when they headed off on location to Nogales, Arizona, which doubled for South Korea.

  While setting up a shot with Rock at the International Airport just outside of Nogales, Sirk tumbled down an embankment and broke his leg. Wheelchair-bound throughout most of the shoot, the director found his technical advisor totally unavoidable. “I had a lot of problems because he was on the set, hanging around, supervising every scene,” Sirk recalled. “I couldn’t bring out the ambiguity of the character as I would have liked. There was a magnificent chance here to make a film about killing and flying.”

  In an effort to make the Rock Hudson version of Colonel Hess more layered and multidimensional, Sirk suggested that the character take up drinking. Hess would have none of it. “He was there on the set the whole time saying, ‘I didn’t drink’ and all that, trying to make me stick to ‘truth,’” Sirk recalled decades later.

  When it came time to promote Battle Hymn, Edward Muhl, Universal’s head of production (and one of Rock’s staunchest supporters), urged the studio’s advertising department to avoid any physical comparisons between Hudson and Colonel Hess: “There is a great lack of resemblance between them and any art showing them together would highlight this and accordingly hurt the picture in the mind of the audience.”

  On the other hand, Universal’s publicity department made every effort to draw parallels between Hess’s heroism and their star’s own gallantry. Stories were planted in the press that suggested that Rock was considering adopting one of the twenty-five Korean war orphans that had been flown in to appear in Battle Hymn (“Is Hollywood’s Handsomest Star Ready for Fatherhood?”). Another mentioned that Hudson was treating the entire group to a day at Disneyland—an outing the studio’s public relations team had actually arranged.

  Reviewing Hudson’s latest effort in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther found it both routine and shrewdly calculated: “Perhaps the most candid comment to be made about Universal’s Battle Hymn is also the most propitious, so far as its box office chances are concerned. That is to say, it is conventional. It follows religiously the line of mingled piety and pugnacity laid down for standard idealistic service films. What’s more, it has Rock Hudson playing the big hero role.”

  In a more enthusiastic notice, The Hollywood Reporter noted that “Hudson has great natural warmth and growing maturity as an actor.” In fact, in a deathbed vigil scene toward the end of the film, Rock is genuinely moving. As the gravely injured Captain Skidmore (Don DeFore) floats in and out of consciousness, Hess tells him that “death is just a gentle step from darkness to light.” Moments later, after the captain succumbs, Hess breaks down. In need of his own consoling, he finds himself totally alone.

  * * *

  According to virtually all the fan magazines, Rock and Phyllis’s marriage was a model of mutual devotion, understanding, and unwavering commitment. In reality, it was in shambles. While vacationing in Rome, Hudson and Gates encountered the young Italian actor that Rock had been involved with when he had last toured the city. The young man told the newlyweds that he was having lunch the following day with actress Anna Magnani. Would they care to come along? Rock eagerly accepted the invitation without consulting his wife. To Phyllis, it was obvious that her husband was completely captivated by the Italian. Capping a day of drinking, an argument ensued once the couple returned to the Grand Hotel.

  Phyllis told Rock that she had no interest in getting together with the Italian. “Why don’t you want to have lunch with him?” Hudson pressed. “Because he’s a silly little fruitcake,” Phyllis responded. Gates claimed that Rock hit her so forcefully that her necklace broke, causing pearls to scatter all over the hotel corridor. Then she began screaming. Bellboys rushed over and separated the couple. The next morning, a contrite Hudson apologized before bursting into tears.

  The couple would reconcile, but Phyllis felt that the humble, good-natured, and down-to-earth man that she had married had let fame, and especially his Oscar nomination, go to his head. “He expected everything to be done for him, swiftly and in the best style,” Gates recalled. “He had lost that boyish wonder that I had found so appealing in him.” But some of Hudson’s friends say that it was not the movie star but his wife who was all wrapped up in the five-star restaurants and front row seats.

  A later companion of Hudson’s, Tom Clark, remembered Rock saying of Phyllis, “The minute we got married and she became Mrs. Rock Hudson, everything changed. She did a complete about-face.
She was very impressed by things like my stardom, by the money, by all the trappings of my name and all the glamour nonsense. You know I don’t give a single damn for all that stuff, but she did.”

  Lee Garlington, another partner of Hudson’s, remembers hearing similar stories: “I asked Rock, ‘Why did you marry that woman?’ And he said, ‘You know, I thought I was in love with her, and when she moved in it was like somebody turned off the tap of a faucet. It changed overnight. She threw out my tan chinos. She threw out my Thom McAn moccasins. We were going to be big, rich movie stars and live the Hollywood way.’ He also told me the entire marriage had been set up by Henry Willson. It always amazed me that Rock could be so easily talked into something. I mean, Phyllis was working on him. Henry Willson was working on him. Confidential was on his back for a while. I’m sure he felt they had to get married. Period.”

  “IT IS MY understanding that Rock Hudson’s wife is to accompany him on the location . . .” read an interoffice memo from MGM’s personnel director Bud Brown to logistics man Joe Finn. The studio was gearing up for its forthcoming production #1700. Along with Phyllis Gates, ten thousand pounds of camera equipment, two light green Shantung dresses, a snuff box, and six pairs of white boxer-type shorts (for Mr. Hudson) were all air shipped to Nairobi in July of 1956 for Metro’s adaptation of Something of Value.

  Robert C. Ruark’s novel, published in 1955, detailed the brutal Mau Mau Uprising in what was then the British East African colony of Kenya. Peter McKenzie, the son of a white settler, has been best friends with native Kimani since their childhood days. After the death of Peter’s mother, he and Kimani became virtual brothers as both are raised by the wife of a Kikuyu headman. Despite diverging communities and customs, Peter and Kimani maintain their close friendship over the years.